The Pendle case begins with a beggar, a pedlar and a curse. In March 1612 a young woman named Alizon Device asked a pedlar for pins, was refused, and he collapsed shortly afterwards, probably with a stroke. She believed she had caused it, and said so. Questioned by a local magistrate, she also implicated her grandmother, and then members of a second local family with whom hers had a long quarrel.
The two households at the centre of it, headed by two elderly women known as Demdike and Chattox, seem to have made part of their living from charming and cursing, which was an ordinary if disreputable rural trade. Each accused the other. The magistrate, working in a county the government regarded as dangerously Catholic and disorderly, sent them to the assizes.
The prosecution's most effective witness was Jennet Device, aged about nine, who gave evidence against her mother, her brother and her sister, and identified defendants in court. English law did not normally accept the testimony of a child that young; witchcraft was treated as an exception, on the reasoning that the crime was too secret for ordinary proof. That exception, and what it did to the Device family, is the case in miniature.
Ten were hanged at Lancaster. Demdike died in gaol before trial.